Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
dissident wrote:We are set for 7 meter higher sea levels in the next few centuries from Greenland glacier melt alone. As Hanson has pointed out in one of his papers the melt is a nonlinear process and I think 2 meters by 2100 is probably too optimistic since that would be melt from all sources. And to think the IPCC was predicting 50 cm of sea level rise by 2100 in its older reports from before 2007.
The Arctic was ice free until 4 million years ago when the Panama channel closed. The global ocean circulation change associated with this is a critical factor and not just CO2 levels. I think we will have winter time Arctic sea ice for a very long time to come even as Greenland loses its ice sheet.
The success of the anti climate science and anti peak oil propaganda will help put the nails into the coffin of its sponsors in the long run. The public will experience pain from various sources, primarily food and energy costs, and will not have been informed the reason for this pain. It is docile now while BAU is relatively stable, but things will get bloody likely by 2040.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Pops wrote:We're dead - eyes glaze - take a drive.
LOL
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
rockdoc123 wrote:According to AR5 WGI chapter 13 Greenland contribution to sea level rise under a 500 – 700 ppm CO2 scenario is somewhere between 0.1 m and 0.5 m by 2500. At > 700 ppm CO2 Greenlands contribution to sea level rise doesn’t reach a metre until 2300. Antarctica under the 500 – 700 ppm CO2 scenario has negative contributions to sea level right through until 2500 with increased precipitation actually increasing Antarctic mass balance on a continuous basis from 2100 through 2500. Under the > 700 ppm CO2 scenario Antarctic contribution to sea level rise is somewhere between 0.1 and 0.9 m by 2500 but is insignificantly positive until 2400.
Under the 500 – 700 ppm Co2 scenario overall sea level rise is in the range of 0.2m to 1.7 m by 2500 and doesn’t reach over 1 m until 2300. Under the >700 ppm CO2 scenario sea level rise reaches above the 1 m level by 2200 and by 2500 is somewhere between 2 and 6 m .
dohboi wrote:T wrote: "I created this thread for the purpose of discussing where we are right now in terms of the climate changes we have already set in motion, not the Guy McPherson megadoom scenario"
I'm a bit confused by this. Did I bring up McPherson somewhere? I was talking about how big of a role the (apparent) gradualness of CC had on peoples (lack of) response to it, and I tried to come up with a comparable situation that might still be gradual but that I thought more people would likely respond more dramatically to. Sorry if I wasn't being clear about that.
I will point out that just a few years ago if someone claimed that the Arctic Ocean would be virtually ice free by at the end of summer within a couple decades, people could have accurately pointed to dozens of scientifically based models none of which were showing any possibility of such a rapid response. But here we are now, with ice volume down to the point that many see such a possibility as quite likely.
The two poles of "extremes" are not equally improbably. There is a very "fat tail" in the probabilities that lean toward things unraveling faster and further than the median projections. That, too, is science. But there is essentially no 'tail' of probability that GW will suddenly reverse itself and we will suddenly get back to the "goldilocks" climate we have enjoyed in the last 10,000 years or so.
I, too, have been looking at the possibility of a breach in the Panamerican Isthmus, but I hadn't thought about the possibility of that development changing ocean currents. Would any such channel be deep enough to have such effects, I wonder? In any case, even with rapid accelerations of SLR, we are not likely to see such development for a few centuries, and a whole lot of other really bad developments will have...preoccupied humanity by then, I suppose.
I think the Sahara-like sand dunes you mention blowing across much of Central North America are a much more likely scenario in the relatively short term, since something like this was the situation just a few hundred years ago. It is one of the first things mentioned as likely to take place even with a one degree C rise in global temperatures in Mark Lynas's carefully researched book Six Degrees.
Pops, is that the kind of prediction that makes your eyes glaze over? If so, I would recommend not reading that book, or for that matter any scientific literature on the subject. Same with the scientific literature on wet bulb temperatures (if that's what you meant by 'boiling in our skins').
Perhaps sticking to reading up on Joan's latest coiffure would be safest after all?
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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